July 25, 2013

I’m awesome at it. I think my highest score was up over 28,000. I often get over 25,000 anyway and seldom lower than 20,000. I’ve mastered the art of pinpointing the exact spot to within meters. I very rarely check Wikipedia or the like, and when I do, usually it’s a matter of “okay, I know the name of the town and what country it’s in, I’ve just been panning all over the country’s map looking for it and am getting impatient.”

And oh dear God, the constant panning! Dear Lord at the long barren usually-Australian roads. Yeah, I can pinpoint exact locations within meters after a LOT of panning and clicking down a road, hoping that there will be a sign showing the name of a nearby city or at least telling me what language is spoken in this place. Or the number of the road.

Only twice have I screwed up so badly that I didn’t even pick the right continent. Once wasn’t too long ago. A lot of locations in the game are in Brazil, and usually a sign or something in Portuguese can be spotted before too long telling this, along with rather obviously tropical scenery. Well, sure enough, at one point when I couldn’t identify any town names, was on some endless forest road, and saw some signs in Portuguese and finally guessed a random spot in Brazil and hoped it was close… it was in Portugal! :irked:
Granted, I had checked Portugal, it’s nice and small, but I didn’t have much specific location, nor anything that might indicate Europe instead of South America, so didn’t see anything special and figured Brazil because it’s a lot bigger and every other Portuguese language location in this thing had been Brazilian.

The other time was just earlier this evening.

You see, the game drops you in Street View and you can pan around until you find a clue or want to kill yourself because tedium. You can follow the road you’re on and find stuff and explore the area.

That is, except for the occasions where you can’t actually move anywhere. You have a 360 view of where you are but that’s all you get. Usually there’s a sign visible or a landmark or something to still indicate where this is. Some of these have been some fancy German building, a snowy road in the northern Yukon, and a snowy Russian neighborhood, none of which I came anywhere close to.

Today? It was a beach. It wasn’t even Street View. It was some guy standing in the water (I could see the shadow) just a little ways from the beach. You could see sand, short trees, and sea to the west. That’s it. No signs. No buildings. Nothing whatsoever.

That could be fucking anywhere!

Only sort-of clue I thought I had was that the sun was to the north, which indicated to me southern hemisphere. So I figured Australia like so many other locations on this thing. Picked random Australian location and hoped I’d get amazingly lucky.

It was Mexico.

When I get almost exact locations, my score is something like 6477. Even when at least in the same country it could be in the 4000 range.

This got me… 32. Just 32.

Which, you know, why was this picture in this to begin with?

The other four in the set I got pretty close, over 6,000 on all I think. Had this one given me anything to work with, could have gone over 30,000 total. Sigh.

I hate this fucking game.

And yet I can’t stop playing it. Get that final score after all five locations, and decide, “Hey, let’s see if I can do better!” And then start a new game. And I’m right back in the middle of some flat desert road with no signs or civilization anywhere… FFFFFUUUUUUUU!!!!!!